As I reported a while ago, the FCC wants to limit our ability to install digital TV tuners in our computers, and thus to build our own digital video recorders. The proposal would have made it illegal to make or sell tuner cards that would decode digital signals where a “broadcast flag” was set. This was supposed to protect the intellectual property rights of Hollywood but at the cost of making it impossible for us to watch such shows on anything but a commercially produced decoder box or TV. So now with this ruling, it will take an act of Congress for the FCC to get its way. The deadline of July 1 for buying broadcast-flag-free HDTV tuner cards is now gone!
Tag: #linux
HDTV capture cards and Digital TV Broadcast Flag
Join the Television Digital Liberation Front! According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) it will soon be illegal to “sell or distribute in interstate commerce a Covered Demodulator Product that does not comply with the Demodulator Compliance Requirements and Demodulator Robustness Requirements.” This takes effect on July 1, 2005.
How Linux Changed the World
On August 25, 1991, the world changed. A college student in Finland by the name of Linus (LEE-noos) Torvalds announced his latest project, a new operating system for the 386 PC that uses the Minix filesystem and various GNU utilities. He named it Linux (LIN-ucks).